Virtual Selling

27Email Essentials

There is a funny thing about email. Almost since Ray Tomlinson sent the first email in 1971 and it subsequently took over our lives, experts have been prognosticating its death.¹ Social media was supposed to kill email, millennials were the executioner's noose, collaboration engines like Slack would make it roadkill, and text was going to put a nail in its coffin.

Yet, it lives. Email is always on—at work and in our nonwork lives. We check it before bed. We check it when we wake up. New emails take the place of old in a never-ending, always-on, overwhelming cascade. We complain viciously about the waterfall of email we receive, all the while adding to the torrent by sending out still more.

Nearly 300 billion email messages are sent and received each day.² Governments work to regulate it. Spam filters try to filter it. Hackers attempt to hack it. But, despite all the measures to control it, just like physically mailing something, you can send an email to anyone if you know their email address. And so, it continues on.

As a virtual selling channel, email is way overused. It is the asynchronous seller's primary form of communication. Email is the perfect channel for avoiding human interaction and keeping people at arms-length.

Email is cold, one-dimensional, and often leads to misunderstanding. Far too many account managers and customer service professionals have replaced the telephone with email, causing great damage to customer relationships and lost revenue. ...